OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning for Velocity-Controlled Robot
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Machine learning is now playing important role in robotic object manipulation. In addition, force control is necessary for manipulating various objects to achieve robustness against perturbations of configurations and stiffness. The author's group revealed that fast and dynamic object manipulation with force control can be obtained by bilateral control-based imitation learning. However, the method is applicable only in robots that can control torque, while it is not applicable in robots that can only follow position or velocity commands like many commercially available robots. Then, in this research, a way to implement bilateral control-based imitation learning to velocity-controlled robots is proposed. The validity of the proposed method is experimentally verified by a mopping task.
Putting Humans in the Natural Language Processing Loop: A Survey
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

How can we design Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems that learn from human feedback? There is a growing research body of Human-in-the-loop (HITL) NLP frameworks that continuously integrate human feedback to improve the model itself. HITL NLP research is nascent but multifarious -- solving various NLP problems, collecting diverse feedback from different people, and applying different methods to learn from collected feedback. We present a survey of HITL NLP work from both Machine Learning (ML) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) communities that highlights its short yet inspiring history, and thoroughly summarize recent frameworks focusing on their tasks, goals, human interactions, and feedback learning methods. Finally, we discuss future directions for integrating human feedback in the NLP development loop.
Tensor Laplacian Regularized Low-Rank Representation for Non-uniformly Distributed Data Subspace Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Low-Rank Representation (LRR) highly suffers from discarding the locality information of data points in subspace clustering, as it may not incorporate the data structure nonlinearity and the non-uniform distribution of observations over the ambient space. Thus, the information of the observational density is lost by the state-of-art LRR models, as they take a constant number of adjacent neighbors into account. This, as a result, degrades the subspace clustering accuracy in such situations. To cope with deficiency, in this paper, we propose to consider a hypergraph model to facilitate having a variable number of adjacent nodes and incorporating the locality information of the data. The sparsity of the number of subspaces is also taken into account. To do so, an optimization problem is defined based on a set of regularization terms and is solved by developing a tensor Laplacian-based algorithm. Extensive experiments on artificial and real datasets demonstrate the higher accuracy and precision of the proposed method in subspace clustering compared to the state-of-the-art methods. The outperformance of this method is more revealed in presence of inherent structure of the data such as nonlinearity, geometrical overlapping, and outliers.
Adaptive Lidar Scan Frame Integration: Tracking Known MAVs in 3D Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

Micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) are becoming ubiquitous across multiple industries and application domains. Lightweight MAVs with only an onboard flight controller and a minimal sensor suite (e.g., IMU, vision, and vertical ranging sensors) have potential as mobile and easily deployable sensing platforms. When deployed from a ground robot, a key parameter is a relative localization between the ground robot and the MAV. This paper proposes a novel method for tracking MAVs in lidar point clouds. In lidar point clouds, we consider the speed and distance of the MAV to actively adapt the lidar's frame integration time and, in essence, the density and size of the point cloud to be processed. We show that this method enables more persistent and robust tracking when the speed of the MAV or its distance to the tracking sensor changes. In addition, we propose a multi-modal tracking method that relies on high-frequency scans for accurate state estimation, lower-frequency scans for robust and persistent tracking, and sub-Hz processing for trajectory and object identification. These three integration and processing modalities allow for an overall accurate and robust MAV tracking while ensuring the object being tracked meets shape and size constraints.
Simple online and real-time tracking with occlusion handling
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Multiple object tracking is a challenging problem in computer vision due to difficulty in dealing with motion prediction, occlusion handling, and object re-identification. Many recent algorithms use motion and appearance cues to overcome these challenges. But using appearance cues increases the computation cost notably and therefore the speed of the algorithm decreases significantly which makes them inappropriate for online applications. In contrast, there are algorithms that only use motion cues to increase speed, especially for online applications. But these algorithms cannot handle occlusions and re-identify lost objects. In this paper, a novel online multiple object tracking algorithm is presented that only uses geometric cues of objects to tackle the occlusion and reidentification challenges simultaneously. As a result, it decreases the identity switch and fragmentation metrics. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm could decrease identity switch by 40% and fragmentation by 28% compared to the state of the art online tracking algorithms. The code is also publicly available.
BEhavioral Leakage and IntEr-cycle Variability Emulator model for ReRAMs (BELIEVER)
Venue: arXiv cs.ET 2021
Year: 2021

Emerging electronic devices are promising to drive the performance of computer systems to new heights, against the notable saturation in traditional transistor-based architectures. Among them, resistive RAM -- or ReRAM -- has attracted a lot of attention among scientists since its practical realization was reported in 2008 and numerous devices, circuits and systems, and also models have been described in the literature. However, behavioral models fail to reproduce device parameter variations and the drift of device state in the absence of a stimulus. This shortcoming substantially reduces the practical relevance of systems and circuits designed with existing models. The work at hand deals with the development of a behavioral model that integrates device parameter variation and state drift based on data collected from our measurements of real devices. As we show in this paper, BELIEVER model enables engineers to conduct more reliable and meaningful design and simulations of circuits and systems that use ReRAMs.
The Automatic Quasi-clique Merger algorithm (AQCM)
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

The Automatic Quasi-clique Merger algorithm is a new algorithm adapted from early work published under the name QCM (quasi-clique merger) [Ou2006, Ou2007, Zhao2011, Qi2014]. The AQCM algorithm performs hierarchical clustering in any data set for which there is an associated similarity measure quantifying the similarity of any data i and data j. Importantly, the method exhibits two valuable performance properties: 1) the ability to automatically return either a larger or smaller number of clusters depending on the inherent properties of the data rather than on a parameter 2) the ability to return a very large number of relatively small clusters automatically when such clusters are reasonably well defined in a data set. In this work we present the general idea of a quasi-clique agglomerative approach, provide the full details of the mathematical steps of the AQCM algorithm, and explain some of the motivation behind the new methodology. The main achievement of the new methodology is that the agglomerative process now unfolds adaptively according to the inherent structure unique to a given data set, and this happens without the time-costly parameter adjustment that drove the previous QCM algorithm. For this reason we call the new algorithm \emph{automatic}. We provide a demonstration of the algorithm's performance at the task of community detection in a social media network of 22,900 nodes.
Utilising Flow Aggregation to Classify Benign Imitating Attacks
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Cyber-attacks continue to grow, both in terms of volume and sophistication. This is aided by an increase in available computational power, expanding attack surfaces, and advancements in the human understanding of how to make attacks undetectable. Unsurprisingly, machine learning is utilised to defend against these attacks. In many applications, the choice of features is more important than the choice of model. A range of studies have, with varying degrees of success, attempted to discriminate between benign traffic and well-known cyber-attacks. The features used in these studies are broadly similar and have demonstrated their effectiveness in situations where cyber-attacks do not imitate benign behaviour. To overcome this barrier, in this manuscript, we introduce new features based on a higher level of abstraction of network traffic. Specifically, we perform flow aggregation by grouping flows with similarities. This additional level of feature abstraction benefits from cumulative information, thus qualifying the models to classify cyber-attacks that mimic benign traffic. The performance of the new features is evaluated using the benchmark CICIDS2017 dataset, and the results demonstrate their validity and effectiveness. This novel proposal will improve the detection accuracy of cyber-attacks and also build towards a new direction of feature extraction for complex ones.
Spectral Tensor Train Parameterization of Deep Learning Layers
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

We study low-rank parameterizations of weight matrices with embedded spectral properties in the Deep Learning context. The low-rank property leads to parameter efficiency and permits taking computational shortcuts when computing mappings. Spectral properties are often subject to constraints in optimization problems, leading to better models and stability of optimization. We start by looking at the compact SVD parameterization of weight matrices and identifying redundancy sources in the parameterization. We further apply the Tensor Train (TT) decomposition to the compact SVD components, and propose a non-redundant differentiable parameterization of fixed TT-rank tensor manifolds, termed the Spectral Tensor Train Parameterization (STTP). We demonstrate the effects of neural network compression in the image classification setting and both compression and improved training stability in the generative adversarial training setting.
TypeShift: A User Interface for Visualizing the Typing Production Process
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2021
Year: 2021

TypeShift is a tool for visualizing linguistic patterns in the timing of typing production. Language production is a complex process which draws on linguistic, cognitive and motor skills. By visualizing holistic trends in the typing process, TypeShift aims to elucidate the often noisy information signals that are used to represent typing patterns, both at the word-level and character-level. It accomplishes this by enabling a researcher to compare and contrast specific linguistic phenomena, and compare an individual typing session to multiple group averages. Finally, although TypeShift was originally designed for typing data, it can easy be adapted to accommodate speech data, as well. A web demo is available at https://angoodkind.shinyapps.io/TypeShift/. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/angoodkind/TypeShift.
Checkpoint/Restart for Lagrangian particle mesh with AMR in community code FLASH-X
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2021
Year: 2021

In this work we present the design decisions and advantages for accomplishing cross mesh format checkpoint-restart in community code FLASH-X. AMReX and Paramesh are the two AMR mesh formats developed and supported by FLASH-X. We also highlight strong and weak scaling study of existing HDF5 I/O checkpoint writing along with new ideas and results (presented during talk) for utilizing heterogeneous compute architectures for improved I/O performance.
Hierarchical Self Attention Based Autoencoder for Open-Set Human Activity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Wearable sensor based human activity recognition is a challenging problem due to difficulty in modeling spatial and temporal dependencies of sensor signals. Recognition models in closed-set assumption are forced to yield members of known activity classes as prediction. However, activity recognition models can encounter an unseen activity due to body-worn sensor malfunction or disability of the subject performing the activities. This problem can be addressed through modeling solution according to the assumption of open-set recognition. Hence, the proposed self attention based approach combines data hierarchically from different sensor placements across time to classify closed-set activities and it obtains notable performance improvement over state-of-the-art models on five publicly available datasets. The decoder in this autoencoder architecture incorporates self-attention based feature representations from encoder to detect unseen activity classes in open-set recognition setting. Furthermore, attention maps generated by the hierarchical model demonstrate explainable selection of features in activity recognition. We conduct extensive leave one subject out validation experiments that indicate significantly improved robustness to noise and subject specific variability in body-worn sensor signals. The source code is available at: github.com/saif-mahmud/hierarchical-attention-HAR
Inter-Carrier Interference Mitigation for Differentially Coherent Detection in Underwater Acoustic OFDM Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Suppressing the inter-carrier interference (ICI) is crucial for differentially coherent detection in underwater acoustic (UWA) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems due to the fact that the UWA channel is inherently violently Doppler-shifted. In this paper, we propose a new ICI suppression method, referred to as the partially-shifted fast Fourier transform (PS-FFT), which eliminates the ICI from both the time and frequency domains. Specifically, the PS-FFT first divides the received signal in the entire block duration into several short non-overlapping ones to reduce the channel variation in the time domain. It then applies the Fourier transform at several predefined frequencies to the received signal in each of these intervals to compensate Doppler shifts in the frequency domain. Finally, it weightedly combines the multiple demodulator outputs at each carrier as one output for symbol detection, with the combiner weights being solved by the stochastic gradient algorithm. Simulation results show that the PS-FFT dramatically outperforms the existing classical methods, the partial fast Fourier transform (P-FFT) and the fractional fast Fourier transform (F-FFT), for both medium and high Doppler factors and large carrier numbers in terms of the mean squared error (MSE). Numerically, the MSE of the PS-FFT is reduced by $\bf{61.83\%-84.89\%}$ compared to that of the F-FFT when the input signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver ranges from 10 dB to 30 dB at a Doppler factor of $\bf{3\times 10^{-4}}$ and a carrier number of 1024 where the P-FFT even cannot work.
Learning a State Representation and Navigation in Cluttered and Dynamic Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2021
Year: 2021

In this work, we present a learning-based pipeline to realise local navigation with a quadrupedal robot in cluttered environments with static and dynamic obstacles. Given high-level navigation commands, the robot is able to safely locomote to a target location based on frames from a depth camera without any explicit mapping of the environment. First, the sequence of images and the current trajectory of the camera are fused to form a model of the world using state representation learning. The output of this lightweight module is then directly fed into a target-reaching and obstacle-avoiding policy trained with reinforcement learning. We show that decoupling the pipeline into these components results in a sample efficient policy learning stage that can be fully trained in simulation in just a dozen minutes. The key part is the state representation, which is trained to not only estimate the hidden state of the world in an unsupervised fashion, but also helps bridging the reality gap, enabling successful sim-to-real transfer. In our experiments with the quadrupedal robot ANYmal in simulation and in reality, we show that our system can handle noisy depth images, avoid dynamic obstacles unseen during training, and is endowed with local spatial awareness.
Growing a Test Corpus with Bonsai Fuzzing
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2021
Year: 2021

This paper presents a coverage-guided grammar-based fuzzing technique for automatically generating a corpus of concise test inputs for programs such as compilers. We walk-through a case study of a compiler designed for education and the corresponding problem of generating meaningful test cases to provide to students. The prior state-of-the-art solution is a combination of fuzzing and test-case reduction techniques such as variants of delta-debugging. Our key insight is that instead of attempting to minimize convoluted fuzzer-generated test inputs, we can instead grow concise test inputs by construction using a form of iterative deepening. We call this approach Bonsai Fuzzing. Experimental results show that Bonsai Fuzzing can generate test corpora having inputs that are 16--45% smaller in size on average as compared to a fuzz-then-reduce approach, while achieving approximately the same code coverage and fault-detection capability.
RevDet: Robust and Memory Efficient Event Detection and Tracking in Large News Feeds
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2021
Year: 2021

With the ever-growing volume of online news feeds, event-based organization of news articles has many practical applications including better information navigation and the ability to view and analyze events as they develop. Automatically tracking the evolution of events in large news corpora still remains a challenging task, and the existing techniques for Event Detection and Tracking do not place a particular focus on tracking events in very large and constantly updating news feeds. Here, we propose a new method for robust and efficient event detection and tracking, which we call RevDet algorithm. RevDet adopts an iterative clustering approach for tracking events. Even though many events continue to develop for many days or even months, RevDet is able to detect and track those events while utilizing only a constant amount of space on main memory. We also devise a redundancy removal strategy which effectively eliminates duplicate news articles and substantially reduces the size of data. We construct a large, comprehensive new ground truth dataset specifically for event detection and tracking approaches by augmenting two existing datasets: w2e and GDELT. We implement RevDet algorithm and evaluate its performance on the ground truth event chains. We discover that our algorithm is able to accurately recover event chains in the ground-truth dataset. We also compare the memory efficiency of our algorithm with the standard single pass clustering approach, and demonstrate the appropriateness of our algorithm for event detection and tracking task in large news feeds.
LCD Codes from tridiagonal Toeplitz matrice
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2021
Year: 2021

Double Toeplitz (DT) codes are codes with a generator matrix of the form $(I,T)$ with $T$ a Toeplitz matrix, that is to say constant on the diagonals parallel to the main. When $T$ is tridiagonal and symmetric we determine its spectrum explicitly by using Dickson polynomials, and deduce from there conditions for the code to be LCD. Using a special concatenation process, we construct optimal or quasi-optimal examples of binary and ternary LCD codes from DT codes over extension fields.
The Effect of Q-function Reuse on the Total Regret of Tabular, Model-Free, Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2021
Year: 2021

Some reinforcement learning methods suffer from high sample complexity causing them to not be practical in real-world situations. $Q$-function reuse, a transfer learning method, is one way to reduce the sample complexity of learning, potentially improving usefulness of existing algorithms. Prior work has shown the empirical effectiveness of $Q$-function reuse for various environments when applied to model-free algorithms. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no theoretical work showing the regret of $Q$-function reuse when applied to the tabular, model-free setting. We aim to bridge the gap between theoretical and empirical work in $Q$-function reuse by providing some theoretical insights on the effectiveness of $Q$-function reuse when applied to the $Q$-learning with UCB-Hoeffding algorithm. Our main contribution is showing that in a specific case if $Q$-function reuse is applied to the $Q$-learning with UCB-Hoeffding algorithm it has a regret that is independent of the state or action space. We also provide empirical results supporting our theoretical findings.
LogBERT: Log Anomaly Detection via BERT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2021
Year: 2021

Detecting anomalous events in online computer systems is crucial to protect the systems from malicious attacks or malfunctions. System logs, which record detailed information of computational events, are widely used for system status analysis. In this paper, we propose LogBERT, a self-supervised framework for log anomaly detection based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). LogBERT learns the patterns of normal log sequences by two novel self-supervised training tasks and is able to detect anomalies where the underlying patterns deviate from normal log sequences. The experimental results on three log datasets show that LogBERT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches for anomaly detection.
Improving Global Adversarial Robustness Generalization With Adversarially Trained GAN
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2021
Year: 2021

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved beyond human-level accuracy in the image classification task and are widely deployed in real-world environments. However, CNNs show vulnerability to adversarial perturbations that are well-designed noises aiming to mislead the classification models. In order to defend against the adversarial perturbations, adversarially trained GAN (ATGAN) is proposed to improve the adversarial robustness generalization of the state-of-the-art CNNs trained by adversarial training. ATGAN incorporates adversarial training into standard GAN training procedure to remove obfuscated gradients which can lead to a false sense in defending against the adversarial perturbations and are commonly observed in existing GANs-based adversarial defense methods. Moreover, ATGAN adopts the image-to-image generator as data augmentation to increase the sample complexity needed for adversarial robustness generalization in adversarial training. Experimental results in MNIST SVHN and CIFAR-10 datasets show that the proposed method doesn't rely on obfuscated gradients and achieves better global adversarial robustness generalization performance than the adversarially trained state-of-the-art CNNs.